I haven't seen this discussed too much anywhere, but Tiger's disc burning from Finder now formats discs in a Mac OS Extended/UDF dual file system. In Panther, disc burning used the ISO 9660 standard. So it is now possible to take existing VIDEO_TS projects and burn them directly in the Finder for set-top DVD Players.

The only drawback is that these discs will mount as Mac OS Extended when inserted into Macs. As such, OS X's DVD Player will not recognize them as DVDs, unless you do an 'Open DVD Media...' from the File menu. Still, they play great on my standalone DVD Player. Goodbye Toast!

Does anyone with 10.4 also have a Sony CD Mavica? I writes to UDF when taking pictures. I have never been able to mount a CD from it before- it always wants to reformat it. I've been downloading pictures into Image Capture for years using the Sony's PTP setting, instead of its USB. It would be interesting to know if 10.4 now will mount the Sony's CDs in USB mode now.

I have a Sony CD Mavica and I just tried it...and it totally works. I had to put the cd in that special cd attachment ring so I could put it in my iBook but it mounted and I could see all the files. [By the way this is a finalized disc. I'll try and see if it works without finalizing the disc.]

Disable Apple's UDF support by simply dragging out a folder called "udf.fs" located in System/Library/Filesystems.

You can do this without even having to re-boot. If the folder is in there along with SAI_udf.fs, (from ReadDVD), the disc will not mount - disk utility can see it - but it will not mount. Now all you do is eject the cd and take out the folder 'udf.fs' and then re-insert the CD - it mounts.

If you eject the CD and put that folder back the CD will once again not read. No re-booting needed at all to test. Tried his on OS X 10.3.9 and it works great. Tried all other UDF tips and none worked.

Would someone mind detailing how to burn a DVD that plays in a commercial DVD-player in Finder? I have some AUDIO_TS and VIDEO-TS files on my hard drive I'd like to get off my computer onto playable DVDs.

I tried just dragging and dropping into a blank DVD image and burning that in Finder, but it seems I wound up with a data DVD that my standalone DVD player couldn't read.

I noticed this question about Titanium 7 over at Apple Support and it included the very answer you are after "I'm having a problem burning DVD's in Toast 7 and it's freezing my Superdrive and computer mid burn. There aren't any problems with CD's, just DVD's and I get all kinds of error messages. I can burn within 10.4.4 by creating a burn folder with the same files after a restart."
Hope this is useful - create a Burn folder.

This does not work for me, or a colleague of mine. We are both running 10.4.5. Our set-top DVD players recognize the disk as a DVD, but then report an error and won't play it. My player actually freezes up and I have to power-cycle it to get the disc out, so your mileage may vary.

some players are going to be picky about
1) having UDF and ISO9660 on the same disk as a requirement
2) UDF version (I think we have 1.02 and 1.50 in hdiutil and IIRC default is 1.50 so I'd ASSUME any burning w/o specifying udf version would use 1.50)
3) Having HFS files.

This works if you image it w/ mkisofs (from the cdrecord package) and then burn it using hdiutil frrom the terminal. So, you CAN burn dvd video w/o Toast in the finder; but you're imaging it first and adding some time.

I'm sure there is an easier way , but I do this:

1)mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -V DVD_VIDEO -o DVD_VIDEO.img /Users/your_username/Desktop/DVD_VIDEO/
2)hdiutil burn -list (WITH THE TRAY OPEN)
-this spits out a bunch of stuff, you can use a shortcut or just copy paste from right here so that your next line looks like this:
3)hdiutil burn -device IOService:/MacRISC4PE/ht@0,f2000000/AppleMacRiscHT/pci@3/IOPCI2PCIBridge/firewire@E/AppleFWOHCI/IOFireWireController/IOFireWireDevice@d04b431f0418e2/IOFireWireUnit/IOFireWireSBP2Target/IOFireWireSBP2LUN/com_apple_driver_Oxford_Semi_FW911/IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceNub/IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceType05/IODVDServices /Users/your_username/Desktop/DVD_VIDEO.img

then it burns and you're good.
mkisofs is in the cdrecord package here: ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/
you NEED to use smake to compile it, which is found... here:

ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/smake/testing

Of course this just gives you a FREE way to do it. hdiutil is slow burning and verifying. What would be perfect would be taking a folder and throwing it at drutil (fast) w/ the hybrid options and having it work on any set top player (reference a sony w/o PAL decode for picky). Verify is still slow(ish) in drutil, although writing is 20% faster than toast for me. So..toast is still good because it does it fast.

The other gotcha is you should probably update your firmware if you're going to be doing this.

Got a way to only put iso and the right UDF version on the disk? That would be the hint w/ the walkthough.